Suhani Mohan is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Saral Designs. She obtained her B.Tech. degree from the Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science, IIT Bombay in 2011. She has completed Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level 1 program from CFA Institute, USA in 2012.
Suhani has worked as an investment banker in Deutsche Bank for about two-and-a-half years. Along with working on strategic equity transactions in the Indian and Asian markets, she was also involved in Corporate Social Responsibility. This was where she first learned about the situation of menstrual hygiene, which made her take a plunge in the social enterprise sector. After years of research, learning and implementing human-centered design and making several prototypes, she co-founded Saral Designs with IIT Madras alumnus Mr. Kartik Mehta in 2015.
Her start-up Saral Designs is a Mumbai-based start-up providing access to quality affordable menstrual hygiene products to low-income women in India. As the pads are produced closer to the consumer using the decentralized technology, the number of distribution intermediaries is reduced to half, which enables Saral to offer higher distribution margins to their NGO partners and healthcare workers, who directly serve the last mile consumers yet keep the price to the consumer half of the multinational brands.
Saral Designs has also won several accolades such as the National Entrepreneurship Award by Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, awarded by the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India. It has also been recognized as the ‘top 10 good businesses of 2016′ by Outlook Business Magazine and as the top 3 global hardware start-ups for social good in 2017 by ASME (American Society for Mechanical Engineers).
Suhani has been recognized as the top 30 trailblazing women by Forbes India and as 25 most powerful women in impact by Outlook India magazine in 2018; ‘Top woman entrepreneur’ at Empower 2016, by Department of Science and Technology & Zone Start-ups; Acumen Fellow; Indiafrica Young Visionary award by Ministry of External Affairs, India, and Goalkeeper of United Nations Global Goals, 2018 (one of 100 global leaders selected by Gates Foundation). She has been a speaker at the UBS Philanthropy Forum at Switzerland and TEDx at IIT Bombay.